Bloody, Dirty, & Dead

King Lear & Gloucester

I did the distressing, dirtying and bloodying of these costumes for KING LEAR at the American Shakespeare Center in 2016. (I was the Costume Shop Manager for their Summer/Fall season that year.) Costume Design by Jenny McNee.

Skinned Pig Wineskin

I built this liquid-pouring sculpture for BLOOD WEDDING at Williams College in 2015. This “skinned, headless pig” needed to pour wine into the glasses at the party. I created a textured pig sculpture out of plastic bags and tape, so it could be easily removed out of the plastic shell I would give it. I coated the plastic bags in liquid plastic until a hard shell had formed, and then removed everything from inside. A wine bag, PVC unions, and rubber gaskets were installed into the shell using waterweld, so the object could be filled with water or wine and get cleaned every day. Then the plastic shell was coated in several colored layers of Dragon Skin, and finally smoothed out with powder to eliminate tackiness.

Dirty Sink

Props Artisan, Nathan Hatfield and I turned a modern fiberglass sink into a dirty porcelain sink with a backsplash. Sink designed by Brian Prather for TYPHOID MARY at Barrington Stage in 2018. I devised the plan of action, oversaw the construction, and completed a distressed paint treatment. The faucet hardware was removed, a wooden structure was created around the lip of the original sink, which we then attached a backsplash to. Then all hard edges and corners were filled and smoothed out, the entire sink was coated in several protective layers of plastic-dip, and the new faucet was installed through the faux-porcelin back.

Human Placenta

I built this fake human placenta for a production of BEAST THING at Williams College in 2018. The production was cancelled (see the statement here: https://events.williams.edu/event/beast-thing/2018-11-02/) so the design elements were preserved in space as an art exhibition about design collaboration. The placenta was made of high pile yarn and a standard corn starch fake blood recipe in a slow cooker liner, coated in several different colored layers of Dragon Skin. Pools of blood were also made of dyed Dragon Skin.